Page 58 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
the English speech community embodies 'the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.' By finding out what distinctions are implicitly present in the English vocabulary of some nontechnical activity, such as that of making excuses, one is sure, he said, to discover something worth knowing,however much one may also need to study the relevant tech- nical requirements of jurisprudence or psychology. Hence, one would do well to begin by consulting some fairly concise English dictionary, so as to make a complete list of the terms relevant to the chosen topic. In this way, one may perhaps come across such facts as that a high percentage of the terms connected with excuses prove to be adverbs (as if most excuses depend not on what has been done but on the manner, state of mind, etc., in which it was done). In pursuit of such an inquiry, one may also expect 'the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.'
Austin (1962) applied this conception of philosophy to important issues in pragmatics as well as in seman- tics. He distinguished the locutionary act of saying something (e.g., It's cold), the illocutionary act per- formed in saying it (e.g., requesting the hearer to close the window), and the perlocutionary act achieved by saying it (e.g., persuading the hearer to close the window). This aspect of his work was further developed after Austin's early death by J. R. Searle (1969) and others.
It should be noticed, however, that ordinary lan- guage philosophy, in Austin's style, need not be con- fined to problems about the terminology and structure of everyday, nontechnical speech. Achinstein (1968; 1983) showed how it can be usefully applied also to certain problems in the philosophy of science. He con- trasted what he called the 'positivist' approach to these problems with his own. Positivists, such as Quine (I960) and Hempel (1965), wanted to replace the actual linguistic procedures of science by supposedly superior ones—procedures that are logically per- spicuous. But Achinstein himself wanted to charac- terize them as they are. So, on his view, explanation, for example, was to be analyzed as a certain kind of illocutionary act, and not as a locutionary act that asserts, say, a covering law, as Hempel's model proposes.
2. The Limits of Ordinary Language Philosophy
The expression 'ordinary language' is therefore to be understood in this context as meaning normal lang- uage, whether technical or nontechnical. But neither Austin nor his followers would have agreed with Naess (1947) that the proper way for philosophers to pursue their inquiries into ordinary language is by using the techniques of opinion-polling and statistical data collection that have been developed in sociology and social psychology. In this respect, the Austinians' attitude toward semantics and pragmatics may be
compared with Chomsky's attitude toward syntax. Like Chomsky, they sought, in effect, to characterize competence, not performance. They aimed at con- structing a consistent and coherent idealization of ordinary usage, not a tabulation of its actual practice that includes all the malapropisms, solecisms, and other anomalies that in fact occur. They were there- fore responsive to the intuitions of language-speakers, rather than to the statistics of people's linguistic prac- tices, as their basic source of relevant information.
Ordinary language philosophy has sometimes been called 'Oxford Philosophy'; but this is a misnomer. Several prominent Austinians lived in Oxford for only a few years, mainly as students (such as Searle and Achinstein), and developed their philosophical ideas subsequently in the USA, while Austin himself had several prominent colleagues at Oxford who were not converted to his way of doing philosophy (such as Ryle, Kneale, Strawson, Dummett, and Williams).
Wittgenstein's later philosophy (1953; 1956, etc.) is sometimes regarded as a form of ordinary language philosophy; but this too is a mistake. Wittgenstein's views were certainly not influenced by Austin, since they began to develop several years earlier; and Berlin (1973: 11) states that Wittgenstein's views had little effect on Austin's circle. Moreover, there were also important differences between the two philosophical methodologies. Wittgenstein did not regard his philo- sophical thoughts as being relevant to a particular natural language, and from the start they were pub- lished in both English and German versions. But Aus- tin explicitly professed to occupy himself with English, even if many of his remarks about English could have been matched by corresponding remarks about other natural languages. Wittgenstein thought of all philo- sophical theories as arising from the bewitchment of human intelligence by language, and he certainly rejected the idea that he himself was advocating any kind of philosophical theory or generalization. But Austin thought that some philosophical theories— mainly his own—were correct. Wittgenstein's recom- mendation to ask for the use of a word, not its mean- ing, tended to blur the difference between sem- antic and pragmatic issues, whereas Austin sought to show the importance of that difference.
3. Achievements
Ordinary language philosophy had two principal achievements. First, it forced all those who entered into any kind of dialogue with its supporters to keep a sharp eye open for fine nuances and subtleties of linguistic usage, which they might otherwise have neg- lected, in the exposition or criticism of philosophical arguments. Second, it provided the first fruitful system of ideas for the foundations of pragmatics. How- ever, it began to lose its cutting edge in the 1960s, along with other doctrinaire forms of linguistic philosophy.
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